Wireless telecom coverage has become nearly ubiquitous in much of the world, especially in industrialized countries. However, in many developing countries as well, whole regions that lack traditional copper-wired telecom infrastructure have skipped over that technology to deploy wireless instead. Modern wireless networks provide a range of voice and data services. Technical details of those services can be found in many places, for example, the 3GPP standards group web site www.3gpp.org.
Some wireless data services, however, are slow, and coverage is spotty. Wireless voice services, by contrast, tend to be of good quality and are available almost everywhere people travel. We refer to “in-band” communications as meaning in the voice channel, as distinguished from a data channel, control channel or other non-voice wireless service. Voice channels are characterized by special performance characteristics. For example, only a relatively narrow range of audio frequencies needs to be transceived, based on the normal human voice. In fact, sophisticated compression and coding techniques are known to enable sending and receiving human voice very efficiently over digital wireless networks. However, these voice coders or “vocoders”—typically implemented in software, DSP chips and the like—do not transmit non-voice sounds well at all. To the contrary, they are carefully designed to filter out non-voice signals.
Related information can also be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,144,336 incorporated herein by this reference. Additional disclosure can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,690,681 also incorporated by reference. And finally, further relevant disclosure appears in U.S. Pat. No. 6,493,338 also incorporated by reference as though fully set forth. The foregoing patents are owned by the assignee of the present application.
Additional aspects and advantages of this invention will be apparent from the following detailed description of preferred embodiments, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.